A case against syntax highlighting (2007)

>Well, no. One of the basic rules of thumb in typography is that, when writing a piece of text, you should choose one typeface and stick to it. Likewise, a splash of colour may grab the reader's attention, but it will inevitably decrease the legibility of the text. The natural flow of the text is broken, and it takes more brain effort to piece together the individual letters into words and semantics. Cognitively, the reading process becomes slightly less automatic…

This hardly makes a case at all. Only one section in the middle is actually dedicated to why syntax highlight is bad and it boils down to a baseless assertion about "biasing" the developer's mind toward syntax. I would counter that assisting developers in thinking about how code will be interpreted or compiled rather than bytes of text is closer to the semantic meaning than without. There's also a comparison to highlight syntax in fiction, which is absurd for many…

> It encourages you to skim through code rather than understand it. Personally I find it allows me to skim through code so I can understand it. I'm not generally interested in syntactic overhead. I care about the names and structures of things. Occasionally I care about the type of things, but less often than I care about what I can actually do to that thing.

"Conclusions[...] Syntax highlighting doesn't improve legibility." Yes. And the author completely missed the point of syntax highlighting: it's not useful to read the code, it's useful to WRITE the code! It's when writing it that you want some early syntactic (and slight semantic) feedback. If you type a keyword and it highlight like a function name, you get a hint that you have a typo in your keyword. If you type a function name and it highlight as a type…